


A Shortage of Scissors

by TAFKAB



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Clueless Bilbo Baggins, Clueless Thorin Oakenshield, Dwarf Courting, Dwarf Culture & Customs, Everybody Lives, Fluff, Hair Braiding, Haircuts, Hobbit Courting, Hobbits in Erebor, M/M, Unrequited Bilbo/Bofur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 18:25:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6387685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TAFKAB/pseuds/TAFKAB
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bilbo and Thorin fail to communicate regarding the cultural significance of growing and braiding hair.  Signals are sent and missed by everyone except Thorin's company.  The cluelessness quotient is high with this one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Shortage of Scissors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Irrealia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irrealia/gifts), [rutobuka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rutobuka/gifts).



By the second year after the death of Smaug, Erebor was a magnificent kingdom, full of light and splendor and bustling, busy dwarves. It offered hot spring baths that made Bilbo groan and curl his toes despite their sulfurous smell; it provided the best of delicate foods—imported or grown near Esgaroth—and the finest mushrooms harvested from quiet, lightless tunnels. At any moment of the day or night Bilbo could avail himself of good ale, good wine, and the best of companions. 

Only one thing was missing. Well, two things, actually, but the second went without saying.

Bilbo could not find a pair of scissors in either Erebor or Dale. Not for love, nor for money. He could find swords and axes and glaives and guisarmes and weapons of every possible length, shape, and description. He could find knives (both case and butcher), cleavers, saws, razors, everything except scissors. He could find every imaginable sort of tradesman from gemsmiths to shoemakers… but never a solitary barber. Not even among men, who apparently took care of that sort of thing themselves, at home and out of the way.

Thus he could not cut his hair. It was gone nigh on three years now, and he found the disarray of his untidy mop of curls quite embarrassing. Some of the folk in Dale mistook him for a beardless dwarrowling. Even Gandalf took a moment to recognize him when he visited. 

In the absence of proper tonsorial care equipment, he had no choice but to wait until it grew long enough to tie back—and that took an age, it seemed, before he could bind it back properly. For months trailing strings framed his face, getting in his way when he tried to read, eat, or write. 

At last, though, he could make a proper tail of it, scooping all the stray locks into a bunch at the back of his head, and they would stay. He wondered what Lobelia would think if she could see him now, and laughed, and went about his business.

For there was a great deal of business; he had a facility with diplomacy and with languages, and his services were needed in particular to smooth the dwarves’ inevitable dealings with the Mirkwood elves. It seemed Thranduil had a liking for Bilbo in spite of his prior depredations, and he was able to negotiate with them, and arrived at deals both fair and profitable to all concerned. 

One day a Mirkwood delegation brought Bilbo a gift to signify the elvenking’s gratitude: a fine-tooled leather clasp to hold back his curls: a neatly worked stag on an oval of leather with two holes within it, and a polished stick to slide through them. 

“How very gracious and unexpected!” He blinked at the gift, and lost no time replacing the worn rawhide tie he had been using. “It’s lovely, yes. Please do extend my most sincere thanks to His Majesty.”

A muscle jumped in Thorin’s jaw, but that was not unusual. Bilbo feared for the king’s teeth whenever they dealt with elves, thinking he would grind them to nubs or crack them outright. 

He went to sleep that night with the clasp on his bedtable, enjoying the sound slumber of the pure at heart, and awoke with a dwarf on his bed.

Thorin, to be exact. Staring at him. A single lamp burned on the table, its low flame dancing in the draft and sending shadows reeling across the walls. But it was definitely Thorin.

Bilbo sat up, rubbing his eyes with his fists, and blinked at him. “What’s wrong? Orcs seen on patrol? Fire in Dale? Elves in the parlor?”

“I have noticed,” Thorin spoke stiffly through clenched teeth, “that you require assistance with your hair.” He pulled himself upright, and Bilbo blinked at him; it seemed a very odd thing to have the King under the Mountain come into his room at some obscene hour of the morning to make an observation about such an unimportant fact.

“Well, yes, but—“

“I would not have you wear the stag,” Thorin managed to grunt, his cheeks flushed red. Perhaps with anger? It must be so. Bilbo was seized with remorse. Of course it was highly improper for him, one of Thorin’s closest counselors, to wear the symbol of his old enemy!

“Oh! I’m very sorry, I didn’t mean to—“

“Turn around, if you wish my braiding.” Thorin managed to unclench his jaw long enough to speak the words. “If you would have my work in your hair instead of the elf’s.” He reached to thread his blunt, strong fingers into Bilbo’s hair. 

“Oh, well, if you think it’s…. Certainly, your help is welcome, though I’m sure it’s an imposition to have you come and…. I never learned the trick of braiding, myself, though…” Bilbo turned as directed and let his mouth babble away as Thorin hitched himself up sideways on the bed and his fingers combed through Bilbo’s tousled curls. 

He had brought a comb with wide teeth, and he ran it through Bilbo’s hair, slow strokes, starting at the ends and working his way up, making a horrible frizzle as the curls separated and electricity invaded the strands. It seemed not to trouble him, though, as he separated sections out and began to weave them, seeming calmer now that he wasn’t speaking. 

Thorin’s hands were steady, very sure, never tugging hard enough to hurt, and before long Bilbo wore four braids, two that began at his temples and two near his nape, pulled back to join at the crown of his head. He felt weight settle on them as Thorin set a clasp of his own to hold them there. 

Bilbo felt for it gingerly; it was a metal barrel clasp, finely worked in dwarvish knots. It clasped the braids and held them there; the short remaining length at the end of each braid fuzzed up in a little curly knot at its lower end. Thorin’s hands left the braids and swept under the fall of his hair at the back, lifting it from his neck. Bilbo’s skin prickled with delight, and he felt himself blush deeply at the feeling of fingertips against his nape. 

“Do not wear the elf’s bauble again,” Thorin commanded, his voice dark and rich, coming from very close behind Bilbo’s ear. 

“Oh, well, certainly not, if you don’t like it. I… well. Thank you.” Bilbo wanted a mirror very much all of a sudden; he wished he could see Thorin’s expression.

The king arose without speaking further, bowed deeply, and let himself out, leaving Bilbo to stare after him, completely flummoxed, only then realizing he was clad in just his thin nightshirt and hadn’t even thought of breakfast.

He got up and dressed, admiring himself in the mirror for a long handful of minutes, though he looked even less like himself and more like a dwarrowling than ever. Still… the braids were well-made, and Thorin had thoughtfully arranged to keep Bilbo’s hair out of his eyes, and that was very kind of him indeed. 

Bilbo clothed himself in haste and went out to see if he could bother the cooks for a spot of breakfast.

He found Ori sitting before a bowl of porridge in the commissary, up early, his nose half-buried in a book. Bilbo went for a bowl and ladled it in, finishing with cream and honey, then a dash of spices, and went to join him.

“Good morning, Ori. Getting a bit of an early start this morning, I suppose. I rarely catch you here.” 

Ori was nearly finished, his spoon scraping the bottom of the bowl, when he looked up to acknowledge Bilbo’s greeting. His eyes went wide and his jaw dropped; he seemed unable to utter a word, and then a bright red flush covered him from chin to hairline.

“Bil—bil,” he stuttered, then reclaimed himself enough to blurt “G’morningBilbo” before snatching his book and fleeing.

“What in the world have I done now?” Bilbo was familiar with the vicissitudes of Ori’s tendency toward extreme and pointless embarrassment; he thought it a shame that Dori and Nori between them had made their younger brother so terribly self-conscious. He hoped when Ori came of age, the young dwarf would have the spine to stand up to them and rebel quite thoroughly. He could use a little more worldliness, or he would never stand a chance of courting a dwarrowdam and raising little shy dwarrowlings of his own.

Bilbo shrugged and finished his own breakfast quickly, savoring every bite, and got up to dispose of his bowl before hurrying to the throne room to take up his duties. He noticed Ori was not the only dwarf to look at him strangely; it seemed every dwarf he met gave him a once-over. It must be the hairstyle, he decided; it was distinctly different from his everyday mop. Though that still did not explain Ori.

Bilbo sighed. Nobody ever quite explained Ori. If anyone tried, Dori would flog him. 

He made it through the day with a minimum of actual humiliation; people soon grew used to his braids and went about their business. Still, it was good to retreat to his room when evening came. He took out the clasp carefully and let the braids unravel, feeling both a vague sense of loss and slight relief. Back to his leather thong in the morning… he tucked the elvenking’s trinket away with a pang of regret. Maybe he could have someone in the armory make him something similar.

Bilbo slept.

He felt the dip of his mattress at once, and blinked into the dim of the room—a single flame lit once again. He did not have to look up to see who had just sat down at his side.

Bilbo lifted himself on one elbow, blinking at Thorin blearily. The King under the Mountain held a bone comb in his hand.

“Isn’t this a bit inconvenient or, you know, beneath you? As a king, I mean?”

Thorin didn’t answer, waiting, and Bilbo sat up obediently, making sure his short nightshirt adequately covered all his bits. The comb slid through his hair, slow and careful. Fingers twined into his curls with care. Thorin’s breath ghosted over his ear, slow and measured.

Bilbo blinked up at the ceiling, imploring the Valar for mercy. If this was going to be a permanent feature of his mornings, he was going to have to start wearing more to sleep in. Possibly an iron codpiece, for starters. The armorers could no doubt help him with that, too. 

“I should really learn to do this for myself, I suppose.” Bilbo wondered who would teach him; Thorin seemed to show no inclination to offer instruction, fastening the braids as he had done the previous day, then sliding his fingers under the rest—again caressing Bilbo’s nape briefly before standing and vanishing, just as he had done the previous morning.

Bilbo glared after him until he was certain the door had shut and Thorin was well away down the hall. “If I’d wanted a tirewoman I could have stayed in the Shire and hired one!” He called after him, but to tell the truth, he was not displeased.

That night Bilbo didn’t get in until late. Balin and Dwalin collared him in the commissary and took him out to Dale, where they did the rounds of the stews and drank enough ale that Bilbo was barely able to sit his pony to return to the mountain, and was still staggering by the time he got back to his room. Dwalin slapped his back so often he thought he had a permanent handprint there—they would find it on him, surely, when they dressed him for his coffin many long years hence. 

And Balin—Balin was strange as well, giving him sly nudges and winks and saying all manner of things that made no sense. Things about how the serving maids’ charms were obviously no longer needed, about how Bilbo was surely going to surprise them all soon, and even, once, a vague reference to the comparative endowment of his pony to other unnamed lovers Bilbo had presumably taken—or might take in the future? That one left Bilbo quite red-faced and stammering.

Maybe the braids were something like a coming of age ritual, a mark that he was truly one of them now? Bilbo couldn’t say. He could only keel over into his bed and fall sound asleep without taking off his belt. 

The next morning Óin woke him instead of Thorin—with a flagon of some foul potion concocted to remedy hangovers, and a large tub of ointment. It appeared to be massage cream of some sort, compounded of heavy oil and herbs. Bilbo could only conclude it was meant to aid in his recovery from all of Dwalin’s savage backslapping. 

Matters worsened gradually—he caught Glóin making a book for bets, but when he offered to put down money, the irascible dwarf refused to give him odds or even discuss the contest. Then Fíli and Kíli came to lunch one day, bracketing him and telling him all about how to friend their mother, Dís, offering so many instructions his mind could not contain them all. After Kíli left them, Fíli lingered, drawing one of his dozens of knives and paring his nails while murmuring dark, vague threats about what happened to those who were false to the line of Durin. Bilbo made a flustered excuse and withdrew in horror, terrified they meant to make him their stepfather. 

So things went for a time, and Bilbo endured it all: Bombur’s jovial insistence that he needed feeding up for purposes of endurance, Bifur’s apparently ribald comments in Khuzdul, punctuated with bawdy winks and elbows, and Bofur…! 

Bofur disappeared almost entirely, and whenever Bilbo encountered him, he had barely a civil word to say; he had even begun to refer to Bilbo quite formally as _Mister Baggins_! Absolutely maddening, that—he had always counted on Bofur for sympathetic and friendly conversation, someone to go drinking with who wouldn’t slap him so hard his spine fell out after, someone who was always ready to share a joke or a smile, or even a shoulder to lean on in the worst of times.

And Thorin—Thorin hardly had a word for him! Showing up in his bedroom of a morning as if he thought himself a serving maid, braiding Bilbo’s hair, touching his neck… and then vanishing to turn back into the King under the Mountain, acting as if nothing whatsoever was out of the ordinary, while all the others went mad around them!

It was not to be tolerated. Bilbo stamped his foot with annoyance, glaring around at the rest of the dwarves in the commissary.

He hadn’t learned burglary for nothing. Not Bilbo Baggins. He was going to put an end to this once and for all. 

Bilbo sneaked away from his friends and into a part of the mountain where he almost never ventured, except at rare seasons of the year when custom demanded. He had learned a healthy respect for its denizens early on, when he attempted to borrow what he wanted.

He still shuddered to this day, remembering a glowering dwarrowdam slapping his hand with so much force it stung. “No!” She had bellowed at him, practically backing him against a wall with the force of her righteous wrath. “You will cut nothing but cloth with these! They are our good sewing scissors, and you may not blunt them!” 

Still, desperate times called for desperate measures, so Bilbo slipped on his ring and ventured the tailor—a place of doom far worse than a dragon’s den, where if you stepped wrong you’d only be roasted swiftly and put out of your misery.

But oh, if you angered a tailor… a pin might slip during the measuring of your inside leg, and the seams of your coat would never again turn out straight, or the hems of your breeches either. The fabric would be cut on the grain rather than on the bias; there would be no slack for letting out, and anything taken up would be far too tight. Not to mention the dreadful prospect of badly-made underthings!

Bilbo was lucky; none worked late over their sewing, and he was able to slide in and lift a glittering steel scissor from its pride of place in a well-stocked workbasket. Tucking it into his pocket, he skittered away, not removing his ring until he was safely back inside his own room, where he laid the scissor on his bedtable. 

He stared at it, huffing, and thought of cutting his hair—but he knew he would make a hash of it. He had to have help.

He would have gone to Bofur, if he thought Bofur would sit down and cut it for him, but lately Bofur was as likely to squeak something polite that ended in “Mr. Baggins, sir” and flee as if he had wargs hot on his heels. 

No, there was only one person he could ask, one person who concerned himself daily with the care and grooming of Bilbo Baggins, esq.: Thorin Oakenshield. He resolved to do so first thing in the morning.

He wakened as usual to the gentle dip of his mattress—half-awake already, weary and drawn from a restless night in which he dreamed his curls fell to the floor and swept away heavily, like gold leaf flaked away in the wind, taking some indefinable thing along with them. 

Bilbo rolled over and stretched, looking up at Thorin. Usually he would just sit up and offer his head, but today he did not.

“I have a request for you, Thorin,” he said softly when the king did not speak, merely looked down on him with his comb held lightly in his hand. 

“Ask,” Thorin said simply, and Bilbo sensed a vast unexplored territory of simple willingness behind the word—as if Thorin needed no reason or explanation, and all that existed in him was the answer yes.

“I have found scissors. Would you cut my hair?”

There it was—the no he had long feared, crinkling Thorin’s smooth brow in sudden baffled consternation. 

“Would you no longer wear my braids?” The words fell from Thorin as if Bilbo had struck him, driving all the breath from his lungs. 

“It isn’t right for you to tend me this way every morning,” Bilbo tried to explain. “I mean, it’s very pleasant, but you are the king. I’m only… a hobbit.” 

Thorin gestured, agonized, as if the objection were nothing. “It matters not to me what or who you are. I would tend you,” he whispered. “When you grew your hair, I believed you wished…. I should not have offered; I should have let you wear the token of whomsoever you would.”

Bilbo tilted his head, watching Thorin with sudden suspicion. “Such as Bofur’s?”

Thorin’s knuckles went white, his grip nearly snapping the comb. “If that is your desire.”

“Or the Elvenking’s.”

This time it did snap, the two pieces falling, broken cleanly. One clattered to the floor and the other rested on the coverlet, gleaming amber in the golden light. 

“You accepted my coat of mail. You grew your hair for me to braid. To see that vicious imp’s work set in your curls…!” Thorin choked, so livid he could not speak. “He sent it merely to taunt me!”

Bilbo nodded, at least some of his suspicions confirmed. “So that is why everyone has been treating me differently.” He felt his hands trembling in his lap. “I had no idea. I meant for you to cut it so you would not have to go out of your way every day to come and braid me.” 

Thorin drew a deep, shuddering breath. “If you invited me to your bed, I would not have to go out of my way.”

“If anyone at all had bothered to tell me how dwarvish courtship worked, I might have invited you long ago!”

Thorin raised stricken eyes to him, and the two hung fire—only their breath audible in the room, unless perhaps Thorin could hear the pounding of Bilbo’s heart, and perhaps he could. It felt as though that was all that was left of Bilbo now; he floated in suspense, only his pulse anchoring him to his body as he watched burning heat kindle in Thorin’s sapphire eyes. 

“How then does one court a hobbit?” Thorin asked slowly.

Bilbo considered. “Sharing foods, ales, and wines and the comforts of home. Spending time together.”

“We spend all of every day together. I have given you all the food and drink and the best rooms in my kingdom.” Thorin sounded baffled, verging on hurt. “Is this not what was required?”

Bilbo laughed at his own folly and reached out, curling his fingers around Thorin’s dark braids, sliding his palms down their length, then closing his hands on them and drawing Thorin down to press their foreheads together. “I suppose it is, at that. Come to my bed tonight, Thorin,” he whispered. “And tomorrow, teach me to braid _you_.”


End file.
